About Me

An Englishman from London, I've spent more than half my life now in the Philippines, with two grown-up daughters and a wife of more than 30 years to prove it. I run an export business making eco-friendly animals of vegetable fiber, a play reading group, and appear in plays and films when I can. I have long felt western civilization needs to turn over a new leaf, but I see now that we all do.

Friday, January 18, 2013

CENSORING THE INTERNET

I hadn't heard of Aaron Swartz, but it turns out he has been a major
player in preventing censorship of the internet - something that many of
us take for granted, but which he warned could become the victim of
sweeping and draconian legislation in the blink of an eye. About Aaron I
learned the following -

At the age of 14, he co-developed RSS, the Really Simple Syndication web protocol that is the key component of much of the web's entire publishing infrastructure.

By
19, he'd co-founded a company that would merge with Reddit, a
user-generated social news site that is now one of the most
visited news sites in the world. He founded Demand Progress,
which was instrumental in fights to keep the Internet open and free, and in the battle to defeat SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.

He
developed the architecture for the Creative Commons licensing system
and in 2010 he was made a fellow at Harvard's Safra Center for Ethics.

He was then prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 by the U.S. federal government, and threatened with up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines
for the crime of downloading too many articles from JSTOR.org, an online
database of scholarly work (to which he had legal, paid access to download scholarly papers). Despite JSTOR's declining to press charges
federal prosecutors hit Aaron with a staggering 13-count felony
indictment.

Under relentless pressure from the office of
Massachusetts Federal Attorney Carmen Ortiz, on 11 January, 2013 Aaron Swartz
committed suicide. He was 26. Aaron's family described his death as
"the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and
prosecutorial overreach."

I would rather say his death was the result of the determination of big business to brook no impediment to profit. Attorney Carmen Ortiz is reportedly considering running for governor of Massachusetts.